How to make global lighting in cycles?
The Internal (rasterizing) engine simulates even, undifferentiated lighting from a distant environment, chiefly using  two settings: the Environment Lighting, and the adjust-to-taste Ambient setting of materials, setting the degree to which the environment lighting contributes to the color of a surface. Ambient Occlusion can further simulate proximity shadows. These methods are essentially informed trickery.

The Cycles (Path Tracing) renderer approximates that same lighting by actually sampling the environment, including the light scattered from other objects in the scene.. no trickery is required. In Cycles (in principle, at least), you don't set 'environmental lighting', you set the environment.

That might include giving the world an emissive color, using the 'Surface' and 'Strength' settings in the World tab, or an HDRI texture; it might involve constructing a local environment of lights, emissive and reflective surfaces as you would in a photographic studio.

Have a look at gandalf's answer here for an introduction to the differences between the renderers